How to deal with copyright infringement

Join the party, be up front about why you’re doing it, and be funny.

It helps if you’re Monty Python.

 

Follow me in China

Several ways to keep up with me overseas:

1. Read my stories online at soccer.usatoday.com

2. Check my work blog, which I may or may not update regularly at dure.usatoday.com

3. Check my Twitter feed, which I will update regularly, at twitter.com/bdure_usat

4. Check our blog for the Olympics, to which I’ll contribute on occasion, at goingforgold.usatoday.com

5. E-mail me

6. Message me on Facebook

7. See the games I’m covering, live on TV in the early a.m. Eastern time. Here’s the TV schedule for the group stage (I will NOT be going to the third women’s game in Shenyang). Start at 7:45 a.m. ET Wednesday for the women’s game against Norway on MSNBC and the NBC Olympic Soccer Channel, which your cable system may or may not be adding.

8. Go to your newsstand or a newspaper rack, plunk down 75 cents and read my stories.

I’ll also update the blog here if I have anything else left to say.

 

Saturday clearout

In which I make up for lost time this week:

- Hey, black people play chess! So say The New York Times and The Washington Post in a neat fit of coincidence. The NYT piece on RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan is a fun read. The Post piece is a failed attempt at sociology. Wonder what’ll happen when both papers realize today’s chess players are pondering poker careers.

- Josh Waitzkin, the subject of the great film Searching for Bobby Fischer, has blossomed into a young adult with interesting thoughts on how we should live and learn. He seems to have moved successfully from one discipline to another – chess, then tai chi, then Brazilian jiu jitsu. (I will laugh myself silly if I see a guy known as a chess player pop up on an Elite XC mixed martial arts card.) He’s well-rounded, but he raises a persuasive argument here against multitasking. At least, I think that’s what he’s arguing — I’m also watching Spongebob with the little one at the moment.

- Speaking of the little ones, I felt a little guilty after a bad traffic day this week. I saw a truck blocking an intersection for an entire traffic-light cycle. I saw a policeman who didn’t feel any need to help out with that mess, but he was content to stop one of the few moving lanes to yell at a guy whose tires had gone on the curb as he went around a car trying to merge into the neighboring lane. Then I stopped at a green light to avoid blocking an intersection, only to see cars from the right-turn-only lane zip ahead of me.

And so I found myself trying to answer the question: “Daddy? What does asshole mean?”

- Now this is cool multimedia journalism: An NYT tribute to Mad magazine fold-ins.

- A pointy-headed journalism mailing list to which I subscribe has been pondering Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer’s comments that print would be dead in 10 years. Online Journalism Review cheekily refers to all the previous “print will be dead” comments with the headline “Writing print’s epitaph – v6.5.08 (service pack 3).” I’ve long been the semi-official list heretic, so I decided it’d be fun to note the coincidence of Ballmer making those comments the same week that Deadspin founder Will Leitch announced he was taking a magazine job. So far, the response has been, “Well, New York also has an aggressive online strategy.” OK, but it’s kept in business with tons of glossy ads for stylish condos way outside the typical journalist’s price range.

- Radio show to which I hope to listen: BBC Radio 2’s satirical comedy On the Blog, featuring at least one name I recognize from Whose Line Is It Anyway? I love the English.

 

Newspaper sites = troll magnets

Check out the unadulterated, inhuman crap being posted at the Sun-Sentinel after Springsteen postponed his show in the wake of … oh, just the death of his bandmate and friend of 40 years, Danny Federici.

Here’s an idea: Let’s use the IP addresses and track these people down, then have them stand before a live national TV audience as we read their comments out loud. Wonder if they’d still call Springsteen a liberal crybaby.

(Obviously, I’m not speaking for my employer. Nor do I really think that’s the best way to handle Web trolls. It’d be fun, though, wouldn’t it?)

 

Live-blogging Last.fm

It’s been a while since I live-blogged anything, in part because I’m no longer idle on weekdays and in part because we finally pulled the plug on XM.

But I’m giving Last.fm another chance. I’ve even downloaded the player and “scrobbled,” which I still think is a hip way of saying “uploaded all of your marketing preferences and occasional accidental stumbling onto porn sites to a database shared by a giant telemarketing firm and Homeland Security.” But anyway …

Hmmm … chose an artist or tag. I’ll choose “rock.” And we get …

Alanis Morissette, You Learn: The song from which her staggeringly popular debut Jagged Little Pill takes its title, but not even the top half of the songs from that release if I ranked them. Cute song with a few good hooks, but overproduced like some old Tiffany release.

Counting Crows, Round Here: Hate the band, love this song. Adam Duritz could sing anything from Louie Louie to Close to the Edge and still come across as the pretentious college-DJ type who hooks up with a succession of the campus’ most eligible women because they all think they’ll be the one to rescue him from those dark clouds following him. (Yeah, those dark clouds? They’re the stench of erratic bathing and pot smoke.) Except on this recording, where he gives just the right emotional lift to an enigmatic, interesting song.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Wind Cries Mary: Like You Learn, this one isn’t bad, but it’s a little flimsier than some of the vital work produced by the same artist. Surely a good change of pace for a live show.

The Troggs, Wild Thing: I’d much rather hear the Hendrix version. Or the Sam Kinison version.

Yes, that’s Jessica Hahn, of Jim Bakker scandal fame, in the video.

OK, so where was I? Oh, right …

Toto, Selfish: For some reason, I want to work in some sort of joke along the lines of “Kansas? I don’t think we’re in Toto anymore.” Surely Steve Morse managed to be in both bands somewhere along the way. I have no idea where to place this song — clearly years and years after the band was any semblance of its platinum days — so I’m relying on Popdose to fill me in. Really, it’s what you’d expect — a vocalist screaming to try to get some sort of attention while everyone else is focusing on the endless noodling of the overly skilled musicians in the rest of the band.

Billy Idol, Sweet Sixteen: When is Billy going to pull a Rod Stewart or Brian Setzer and start paying homage to the 40s and 50? He could pull it off, and it’d be better than utterly forgettable 80s relics like this.

My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade: I don’t know. Maybe if I were 19, getting rejected by all the women who were hanging out with Adam Duritz-type DJs, looking forward to financial independence even if I had no idea what to do career-wise, reading tedious academic prose and all that, I might appreciate this with the correct level of irony. Since I’m now officially 2×19, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the unfortunates mentioned in the song or to view them with cynical detachment or what. I just maintain Natalie Merchant could kick all their asses.

I’ll have to wrap there for now. Interesting mix of music, at least.

 

Weird and wonderful traditions

According to the legend at the Wikipedia entry and this CBC broadcast, NORAD took over as the official Santa Claus tracker when a newspaper accidentally confused a store’s “Santa hotline” with a secret phone line at the height of the Cold War. Great timing.

All I can verify first-hand is that I’ve been checking NORAD’s Santa tracker since I first went online in 1996, and it never ceases to amaze me. (Granted, it’s slightly disappointing to know that the people doing all these charming videos aren’t in the nuclear blast-proof mountain in Colorado anymore, but it’s still fascinating stuff.)

I’m clearly not the only one watching. This year, the videos are going up on YouTube, and you can see the hundreds of thousands of page views tonight alone.

It’s one of the most incongruous productions imaginable. It’s hard to imagine a job grimmer than watching the sky for impending Armageddon, and yet these folks have the sense of humor to animate Santa’s sleigh doing flips past world landmarks.

Great stuff.

Merry Christmas to all, and may Santa pass through your airspace safely.

 

The radio verdict

Following up “Launch vs. Last” …

I gave Last.fm a good solid try. I gave Pandora a whirl.

Tonight, while fighting a case of writer’s block (story will … run … Thursday), I figured out how to make my Launch player run in Firefox.

So I’m listening to Sarah Blackwood’s soothing voice on the great, non-downloadable Dubstar song Just a Girl She Said. Last.fm is uninstalled. Pandora … well, I haven’t done much with it, though I’ll give it the occasional listen just to see what artists it thinks most closely resemble Tori Amos and Rush. (Van Halen? Yeah, guess again.)

Apologies to the Web hipsters, but I’m sticking with Launch/Yahoo. It’s better than Last. It’s better than Pandora. Deal with it.

 

Launch vs. Last

I’m a longtime Launch.com devotee. Just check out my station. Before I joined the iPod ranks a couple of years ago, Launch was the soundtrack of my workday. I discovered so much good music — Carbon Leaf, Rachael Yamagata, Stereophonics, Dubstar, newer Los Lobos, Blue Man Group, Hayseed Dixie, newer Dylan, Mary Lou Lord, newer Big Country, some Jonatha Brooke — and some Chris Rock and Steve Martin comedy bits.

I’ve listened less at work these days. My job is a little more social than it used to be, and for the moments I need to crank up the volume and ignore my co-workers’ incessant yammering on movies, I have the iPod.

So I’ve been thinking of cancelling my $3/month subscription to Launch — you can use it for free, but I pay to get it without ads. Mrs. MMM and I are fanatical about keeping subscription costs low. Many of our magazines are freebies, including the two I get for networking through MediaBistro. We do NOT get HBO, so don’t ask us about The Sopranos.

Yahoo! also isn’t doing much to develop the Launch service. I haven’t noticed a new feature in, oh, three years or so. They’re focused on developing Yahoo! Music, which puzzles me. (Pay $6/month to listen to music on my computer but not my iPod? Where do I sign up?!)

And I’ve noticed Last.fm widgets popping up everywhere. Curious, I checked it out with Wikipedia — the 2007 equivalent of asking a neighbor — and I was impressed with what I read.

I signed up for it, and … I’m not really impressed.

I’m using the free service, and it seems I have to pay $3/month just to bring it up to the level of Launch. And I’d still miss a few features such as song rankings. Yes, Last.fm has “love” and “ban,” but there’s nothing in between. Launch gives you a number ranking and sets your playlist according to your preferences. You can even set up a couple of different “stations,” some ignoring your rankings and some relying on them almost exclusively, though that may be a subscriber-only feature.

I’ve also found it’s a good way to check out a new album. When Carbon Leaf and Paul McCartney released albums in the past couple of years, I ranked the artist and the album 100, guaranteeing I’d hear a couple of songs in a couple of typical listening hours.

Last.fm seems a lot less interactive. Sure, you can share your preferences with others, but Launch also has that. (They’re called “influencers.”) I haven’t figured out how to do anything other than naming an artist and hearing similar artists. Even that’s a little sketchy — when I entered “Rolling Stones,” my playlist was stuck in the ’60s. What about the new Stones stuff?

So, Last.fm users, what do you like about it? What am I doing wrong? I’m sure I can grow to like it, but is it worth canceling Launch to rely on this instead?

And have you guys ever considered Launch?

 

Reasons why I’m becoming less and less enamored of the Web

1. Less information-sharing, more shouting at each other. That’s the big one. I could and probably should write a book on the subject. But I’d have to call it something like “A$$holes: How Special Interests Are Hijacking Your Freedom” to get anyone to read it.

2. When I do a Technorati search on my work blog, I get a bunch of automated aggregators pulling in anything that mentions a keyword — soccer, Andy Roddick, HGH, etc. I think I’ll work in the word “nudity” tomorrow just to see what happens. (Because I mention a lot of Olympic athletes, I do get the occasional search for “gretchen bleiler nude” and so forth.)

If you go by sheer readership, I write a very successful blog, but I get far less feedback on it and have far less impact than I did when I was scratching out a column for a mid-sized paper almost 15 years ago.

3. The waves of the future are (A) blogs that harness all the shouting and (B) multimedia projects that will undoubtedly win all sorts of awards but tell me nothing and give me no narrative cues.

If you could go back in time and tell the 14-year-old computer geek I once was that the future would revolve around a giant information-sharing network in which skill with words and programming would be highly valued, I would have been thrilled. “Geek” as a compliment? That’ll be great!

I’m venting a little here, but the optimist in me has a question. What can we do to reclaim the Web? Should we just hang out in outposts of sanity like the music blogs I’m frequenting more and more these days? Or do we need some sort of grass-roots movement to change the whole bloody thing?

 

Let’s join the movement …

… to rid the Web of the overused, outdated, lazy-crutch of an insult: “… on crack.”

As in “He runs like Jesse Owens on crack!” Or the more pejorative “Are you on crack?” That’s sometimes cleverly disguised as “You must be on crack” or “Put down the crack pipe.”

I know I’m turning into an old fart before I’m 40, but I happen to be right about this. Right?